(Sten was Jeeves)

Basically, I’m terrible at the “Roleplaying” aspect of RPGs and just tell people whatever response I know is going to get the outcome with the most cash, EXP, or trophies. Upon reflecting on that, I realized it basically made my Warden a racist hedonistic douchebag who had sexually harassed his entire team by the end of the game.

same here for instance in a game of fallout 3 i did every nice guy quest in megaton that i could do including the survival guide ~twitch~ and blew it to kingdom-come then proceeded to go on a mass murder spree in paradise falls – after I did the slaver quest line -, tenpenny tower – after i got the ghouls and humans to get along -, and rivet city -after I found the android – in that order then sat back and watched as The Regulators and Talon Company had a small war over who was going to kill me I won the war with my handy dandy mini-nuke MIRV Launcher went back to tenpenny tower took a nap and got the red ring of death.

Fallout 3? I just do Operation Anchorage… then sorta lose interest with the rest of the game usually. It is all about getting General Jingwei’s Uniform (off his body then out of the simulation)… Everything else is meaningless.

I’ve found that stories sometimes function better when one of the characters is kind of a douchebag. In such cases, I usually just let my characters be me without a filter. This has lead to some very intersting character chemistry when playing with real people.

He totally didn’t. Sten never respected anything I said. This is why I usually left him to rot.
About the ONLY reason to let Sten out of the cage is to access the amazing rainbow butterfly sword from that feastday DLC thingie.

My D&D character is kind of like your horribly racist Warden. The first campaign I took him on we went to a village and I sexually harassed the mayors wife and got us kicked out making my DM improvise the next hour.

Naw, the way it works in DA the humans are like regular fantasy Europeans, the Elves are like every racial minority, the mages are like X-Men, and the dwarves are super classist. So if you play an elf you get the option to accuse every human of the game of racism and be rude to them just because you’re an elf, or in some cases just flat out kill them for being humans. And I’ll admit I did my share of shooting first and asking questions later.

Fun fact: The clan from the Dalish origin story in Origins is the same Dalish clan encountered in Dragon Age 2.

Fun fact: Once I found this out, I decided to play the most evil Dalish character I possibly could… including making her genocide another clan of her own people… mostly because I wanted to see what Merrill would say about her in the second game.

Totally wasn’t worth it. The sum total of carry-on effects from Origins to DA2 is so very minimal… EVEN as a Dalish Elf.

Meh. Whenever I DM I just provide a setting and let the players go nuts.

So far we’ve got two warforged (Pretty much machines), a guy with a contraband rifle, and a lizard riding a dog. So far they’ve hacked their way through tigers, almost triggered a war between humans and orcs, fought their was through hordes of plague rats then got their faces eaten by mind controlled sharks. Then another not mind controlled shark came by and started eating the bodies, but I somehow made it cute, so all is well.

I usually run two campaigns. One serious “think of the consequences as if it happened in real life” and one “go crazy, I don’t care”.

One of my players however did make the obvious observation of, “How can I think of analogous real life consequences, when you can throw masses of arcane energy at people, sword fights are determined by probability, and all creatures are listed on a challenge rating table?”

Ha! Right there! Not all monsters have a CR. And furturmore, if he was referring to the suggested EXP rewards table not all CRs are listed there. Say your level one character went and fought a CR50 monster because he found the sword in the stone. That would not be listed.

And in any case, D&D battles are based on luck more than probability, which is how it is in real life. a natural 20 always hits, so even if there is no way you can beat something, you still can anyways.

Sounds like I need to play with you. Whenever I play, I always play as chaotic neutral, which really pisses off some DMs. For example, one time I went off looking for magic mushrooms in the middle of the game. Being chaotic neutral, I ate them, Unfortunately, it turned out that they were poisonous and we later used them in the quest to kill a dragon in a cave we weren’t supposed to be able to kill in the game. Then, when he created something else we weren’t supposed to be able to kill, I pissed him off because I would keep attacking it, then using the Meld into Stone spell so that the monster couldn’t harm me. I love playing chaotic neutral, I just get the feeling some DMs don’t know how to handle it or hate when you do.

I’ll do it every so often. Although I fondly remember one campaign in Exalted where I decided my character was going to be this hedonistic man-whore. It worked out well for me, since another player had made his character with plant abilities into the “Lord of Weed” so we were sex and drugs. We basically created parties in whatever town we rolled into just by virtue of us being there. Good times, though counter-productive to actually getting anything done.
I seem to recall the other players hating us intensely…

sexually harass each other? :/ i feel like a minority now, having started off with a warforged cleric who has no idea what sex is to begin with and who is incapable of being poisoned (and therefore drugs are out).

I hear you. My first real with-other-people-RPG character is liable to be a misanthropic omnicidal maniac who dislikes the very idea of reproduction. If he finds that Level One Slimes are so common because they reproduce by mitosis, he’s liable to break a little.
Really, though, I don’t even play games with romance options.

Nah, that’s pretty much spot on. I gave up DMing for a while because after being requested to do make a Viking/Norse campaign and give the characters backstory for them it turned into a 73 year old human druid fisting someone in front of her child and then turning into a bear.

It gets better. At one point they captured a 7 year old boy, nearly sold him into slavery, then handed him over to a temple of Hel, where they asked to give him to her.
They did this all on their own, mind you, and were offered no reward to do so.

Not to mention every single one of them is damn lucky with their rolls so they manage to get away with most things.

Tabletop RPGs have a really rather different paradigm to VGRPGs. In videogames, there’s no fat guy sitting opposite the you at the table, staring you down because you won’t describe the size and texture of your drow’s areolas.

Sten needs to relax more,have a few grapes and lie down for a good and deep massage 8)
Possibly some sex as well. Relieves a lot of stress, sex. Warden was practically trying to do him a favour, he’s just not cooperating enough to feel the positive effect XD

You just want us to oogle Sten. I don’t normally go for big, beefy guys but I make an exception for Sten and the Commander.

I kind of floated back and forth between intentionally skewing my responses to get things and being over-overbearingly nice. Though my character would still never be a pushover. I only played through one and a half times and both times I went for Alistair.

Yes, the Warden Commander is the player character. You can play him/her in dozens of ways. The path of the Jerk is a particularly popular path. You can be a huge hero and still treat your team like disposable cannon fodder because Dragon Age doesn’t have a morality system, it has an approval system and characters will react in-character to stuff you do with/without/to/for/against them.

Yep, chosen one, can save the world or destroy it depending on what he wants. The game has a cliche story, but the delivery is what makes it fun. And the fact that if you want, the character is bi, and when you save a whorehouse, you can sleep with a woman who’s voice is deeper than a diesel engine.

Nope, just the regular PS3 DA:O. Ogrhen has a couple dialogue trees that come up when you talk to him in camp where you can hit on him/he’ll mistake your male warden for a woman and you can keep the banter going until he passes out drunk. And Shale has a bit after you do her origin quest thing where she finds out she was a dwarf lady where you can make kind of a half-assed pass at her, like compliment her figure or something, and she tells you she’ll crush you if she catches you looking at her bottom. Something like that.

Even though i did not know who either of them where, i thoroughly enjoyed that comic… Also, i scared everyone in by running through my house and shouting “MONDAY MONDAY MONDAY MONDAY MONDAY!” and then diving onto the computer chair to log onto your site…

I’ve been following your work with this webcomic for a while now. There have been a lot of moments when I laughed my ass off, and a bunch of ‘daaaawwww-that’s-cute’, and ‘holy-crap-that’s-awesome’ moments as well.

Never would I have imagined that there would be a ‘snort-while-drinking-coffee-due-to-the-completely-unexpected-reference-to-Jeeves-and-Wooster’.

Pfft. Rivalry and still get benefits? No way. I mean, there are benefits, but not so much for Hawke. Like, if you’re on the Friendship path with Varric, he’ll get a trait that buffs the whole team. On the Rivalry path, he’ll get a trait that buffs only himself.

“it’s actually OK not to be someone’s friend, you can actually push them to the point of rivalry, but have them still stay in your party. So with Varric; he get an ability called Authorized Biographer, which basically offers buffs for your entire party, if you’re nasty to him, he won’t leave but he’ll get an ability called Un-authorized Biographer, which basically saves those buffs for himself.”

Thank you, I hadn’t seen that! That’s pretty interesting…but at least is still better than the old way of no buffs for dislike. I think I’ll still go after the rivalry path for a few people (especially the love interested I choose….I like the idea of hatesex, so sue me), but I’ll probably go for friendship for most playthroughs.

Ps thank you for ignoring that I wrote ‘heared’ in my first reply. I clearly need to get more sleep.

I feel very stupid, since I know how to pronounce coelacanth correctly, and I made the correlation between coelacanth and Coelasquid, yet I had been pronouncing it basically as “koala-squid”… Feel so dumb, man…

Also I think that maybe the sexy companions to the warden were accidentally flipped. In panel 4, they appear to be facing us and behind him, and therefore on the Warden’s left. In the other panels, they’re on the right.

Sorry to be a kibitzer or whatever. It took me a while to figure out what was weird about it. It could just be that the sexy companions are laying back on him or something. I don’t really know.

Somebody already gotten on me about it somewhere else in the comments. Yes, I do know they’re backwards, I tried flipping some of it before I inked but I wasn’t content with how the art was balanced and I couldn’t be assed to recompose it all to something better. Yeah, it’s wrong, but honestly I have a life and a job so there’s a certain cutoff I have to put on the effort I put into a free internet comic about video games. Just pretend they shuffled around when Sten barged in or something :P

The root word of Coelacanth and coelom translates to something more like “hollow” than “cavity” from what I’ve heard. The word “coelacanth” refers to their hollow, liquid spine.

I’m not sure how assholy i might come across but i was rather surprised that people couldn’t make a link and pronounce the name. People don’t read hard enough- a quick scan may look like cola squid but that’s just lazy

Wait, it’s alphabetical… wait, what? How is there nobody with a last name that begins with “a” in acting… hmm, it may be by time period, then alphabetical, because it looks like 1-10 are all really old movie actors… IMDB, you confuzzle me…

My current DA playthrough is the stories of a bald dwarf named DUMLOIN, and the adventures of his massive nose. And yes his name is all caps. It makes it seem like he always yells his name. He’s also basically a hyper hedonistic douchebag. Rascist not so much

Aww, I liked Mass Effect. I liked most of the characters and those that I didn’t like I’m assuming are still in the middle of their character development arc. I do know Miranda’s is most visible if you take her with you to the final battle.

ME2 was supposed to be more of a psychological thriller, methinks. I didn’t care much for it either way. I’ve had plenty of way better FPS’s along the way, and “scary” stuff doesn’t do much for me… or to me. *shrug*

i feel abit sorry for Sten, Warden really feels like that creepy friend you don’t want as a roommate, the one that maybe secretly inlove with you or like always doing something to torment you by making you try to find your clothes everyday.

I am an avid reader and fan and proponent and recommender of your comic, and I love everything about it… except that Brando crap you spout all of the time. You know he was a douchebag right? That he used to write his lines on his scene partner’s foreheads because he was too cool to learn shit; that he was kicked out of several movie projects because he was such an ass to work with? He got kicked out of college for riding his motorcycle through the hallways (yeah, that sounds badass, but remember that these were students in an acting college at THAT time, let alone ours, and that everyone there was spending money they really didn’t have). Its hard enough for men these days to have decent masculine role models; choosing to honor a man who was so despicable is not the answer.

Truly the manliest man ever was Abraham Lincoln; professional boxer and lawyer and president during a flipping civil war, he also made the hard choices, and lived with them. His cabinet was made up of heated opponents on purpose, because he knew that even though it would mean every single cabinet meeting would be a battle that they would keep him and each other honest. Plus, 0% douche.

It seems that about once a month someone gets their undies in a bunch about the Brando thing and writes me an angry letter about what an asshole he was or leave a long angry comment berating me for respecting him. I’m getting tired of writing the same essay on his personal life time and time again, so I’m just going to leave you with some quotes and remind you to bear in mind that no one does what they do without a reason, and you really do need to read more than just the sensationalist slants of a person’s life to understand their whole story.

“I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armour because I’m too sensitive.”
“Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.”
“You can say something in a certain spirit, with a smile, but when it appears in print, there’s no smile.”
“Regret is useless in life. It’s in the past. All we have is now.”
“I don’t know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I’m going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass”
“Would people applaud me if I were a good plumber?”
“The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them”
“If there’s anything unsettling to the stomach, it’s watching actors on television talk about their personal lives”
“People ask that a lot. They say, “What did you do while you took time out?”, as if the rest of my life is taking time out. But the fact is, making movies is time out for me because the rest, the nearly complete whole, is what’s real for me. I’m not an actor and haven’t been for years. I’m a human being – hopefully a concerned and somewhat intelligent one – who occasionally acts”
“That’s a part of the sickness in America, that you have to think in terms of who wins, who loses, who’s good, who’s bad, who’s best, who’s worst . . . I don’t like to think that way. Everybody has their own value in different ways, and I don’t like to think who’s the best at this. I mean, what’s the point of it?”
“What do I care? I’ve made all the money I need to make. I won a couple of Academy Awards if I ever cared about that. I’ve been nominated I don’t know how many times and I’m in a position of respect and standing in my craft as an actor in this country. So what the hell, I don’t need to gild the lily.”
“It is a simple fact that all of us use the techniques of acting to achieve whatever ends we seek…. Acting serves as the quintessential social lubricant and a device for protecting our interests and gaining advantage in every aspect of life”
“Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski. They can’t help it, but, it is troubling.”
“people often spoke about that, “Oh, my God, what a wonderful scene, Marlon, blah blah blah blah blah.” It wasn’t wonderful at all. The situation was wonderful. Everybody feels like he could have been a contender, he could have been somebody, everybody feels as though he’s partly bum, some part of him. He is not fulfilled and he could have done better, he could have been better. Everybody feels a sense of loss about something. So that was what touched people. It wasn’t the scene itself. There are other scenes where you’ll find actors being expert, but since the audience can’t clearly identify with them, they just pass unnoticed. Wonderful scenes never get mentioned, only those scenes that affect people.”
“Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.”
“Everybody ought not to turn his back on the phenomenon of hatred in whatever form it takes. We have to find out what the anatomy of hatred is before we can understand it. We have to make some attempt to put it into some understandable form. Any kind of group hatred is extremely dangerous and much more volatile than individual hatred. Heinous crimes are committed by groups and it’s all done, of course, in the name of right, justice.”
“Homosexuality is so much in fashion it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think about me. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing”
“I know I’m not an easy person to get along with, I’m no walk in the park”
“The good directors that I’ve worked with will say I’m a good guy. The other fellows will say I’m a bad guy.”
“I had a great deal of respect for Don Corleone; I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, dignity, refinement, a man of unerring instinct who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment. I saw him as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a man who believed in family values and was shaped by events just like the rest of us”
“I had signs and cue cards everywhere — on my shirt sleeves, on a watermelon and glued to the scenery. Not memorizing lines increased the illusion of reality and spontaneity.”
“Everyone on a movie deserves an award – not just one person”
“I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmaneuvering it. I would do anything to avoid being treated like a cipher.”
“People will like you who never met you, they think you’re absolutely wonderful; and then people also will hate you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any real experience with you. People don’t want to lose their enemies. We have favorite enemies, people we love to hate and we hate to love. If they do something good, we don’t like it. I found myself doing that with Ronald Reagan. He is anathema to me. If he does something that’s reasonable, I find my mind trying to find some way to interpret it so that it’s not reasonable, so that somewhere it’s jingoist extremism.”
“I’m not going to lay myself at the feet of the American public and invite them into my soul. My soul is a private place. And I have some resentment of the fact that I live in a system where you have to do that”
“Most people want those fantasies of those who are worthy of our hate – we get rid of a lot of anger that way; and of those who are worthy of our idolatry. Whether it’s Farrah Fawcett or somebody else, it doesn’t make a difference. They’re easily replaceable units, pick ’em out like a card file”

You’re free to think what you please of the man, but he is the sort of person that I respect.

Uh… no offence, and I dont have any particular grudge against Brando either, but… all that does kinda make him sound like a dick. “Yeah I act like a prick, and here”s a list of reasons of why I get to act like that without getting my teeth punched in…”

Not that he’s the biggest asshole in media, not even close. Hell, he comes off downright mellow compared to Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise. Atleast Brando isnt a drunken anti-semite.

I have more respect for a person who has strong beliefs, accounts for them in a rational manner, and doesn’t apologize for them than I do for people who try to be everybody’s friend. Personally, I would rather befriend a person who insults you to your face than behind your back.

But hey, like I said, that’s the kind of person I respect. You’re free to find your own role models.

Proportionately, it’s still less money than tuition is these days. American tuition can be more than a year’s salary these days depending on where you go. (and I guess what your job is) $30 was worth more back then, but it wasn’t the $18,000 to $43,000 that college runs you these days.

But yeah, I think the motorcycle thing was when he was in military school wasn’t it?

“Brando had been held back a year in school and was later expelled from Libertyville High School for riding his motorcycle through the corridors. He was sent to Shattuck Military Academy, where his father had studied before him.”

Eh… I’m not surprised. He’s kind of an interesting character, but… he’s also very “blah”. He’s very cliche, which is weird, considering what he is… but, yeah. I think that’s probably why. His personality is essentially, “I love cats, I love a good cigar, and I love killing big nasty things.” Meh.

That’s a relief. I liked the movies, but only for the fact that they really took some interesting angles on mythology, but didn’t really care for Hellboy as a character. I might have to start reading the comics…

How is he cliché? Personally, I thought he was a fairly original character . Because even though he’s an ‘superhero’ type character, he acts realistically, and by realistically I mean he would act as anyone would if they had badass abilities.

Lol, as in ‘sorry but you’re wrong. ha HA!!” sort of sorry… and I have the strange habit of adding sorry to just about everything. People are so sensitive sometimes, and you never know when people are going to freak out about your posts.

The last time I tried to roleplay on D&D, I ended up making a psychotic Elven Wizard whose goal is to kill the Sun God. Worst thing she did was keep a Goblin skull as a trophy, to the disappointment of the Party Paladin (who at the time gave my character a warning about her behavior).

With Video Games, I guess I mostly try to find a balance between finding the most profitable choice and not being a petty asshole. I’ll try and get people to see things my way with my awesome talking, but I’m not gonna go “BWAHAHA NOW YOU DIE” after I get paid.

Yeah, I was aware of that, but compositionally I hated it flipped because it cramped the art and messed with eye direction so I just went with it. Pretend they all scuffled around when Sten charged in.

God…
Please tell me I’m not the only one who wishes sten was romancable
and hey
the night after you ‘join him in his tent’ you could have one of those small red ‘injury’ boxes
ya know, cause sten likes it rough
(if you don’t get this, you’ve never listend to him talk to morrigan and you should, it’s funny as f***)

I totally didn’t even just make that up right now. In any case I look forward to sexually harrassing all the dudes of Dragon Age 2 to make up for the fact that Zevran was so lame and I had to spend so many multiples of 40 silver in the Pearl to hook up with a dwarf.

So like…when I get round to playing Dragon Age, is this the kind of awesomeness that I’m going to experience? XP; I really love Sten from these comics, but I have no idea if this is exactly how he is in the game.

If you don’t go out of your way to spring him from jail at the beginning of the game, you can assume that he just dies when the darkspawn trash the city.

Otherwise, yeah, people seem to love him or hate him, he’s the big stoic no nonsense platoon commander who occasionally goes on tangents about baked goods, kittens, and kinky sex. The only way to get his approval up is by backsassing him and giving him paintings. He doesn’t like doing anything that diverts from the main quest and flirts back and forth with the stone golem sometimes.

■Morrigan: You seem so deep in thought, my dear Sten. Thinking of me, perhaps? The two of us, together at last?
■Sten: Yes.
■Morrigan: I… what did you say?
■Sten: You will need armor, I think. And a helmet. And something to bite down on. How strong are human teeth?
■Morrigan: How strong are my teeth?
■Sten: Qunari teeth can bite through leather, wood, even metal given time. Which reminds me, I may try to nuzzle.
■Morrigan: Nuzzle?
■Sten: If that happens, you’ll need an iron pry bar. Heat it in a fire, first, or it may not get my attention.
■Morrigan: Perhaps it would be better if we did not proceed.
■Sten: Are you certain? If it will satisfy your curiosity…
■Morrigan: Yes. Yes, I think it is best.

The biggest impression I got from the promo screens of the Mages was that Qunari architecture seems to have been retconned from the Mayan style it was claimed to be the first time around to something much more European.

They essentially made them a partial rip-off of WoW’s Draenei, and a partial ripoff of generic Fiendlings from D&D. I.E., Tiefling, and the like… it’s really suck, actually, because up until the retcon, the Qunari had their own flavor. Then they decided to genericize them…

Really? The Qunari were essentially Semi-giants with bronze skin, pretty generic if you ask me.It was there philosophy and culture that made them unique, not their appearence IMO, so the Horns don’t bother me either way

Not many fantasy series have seven foot Turkish elves with violently bright eyes and customarily cornrowed white hair.

Almost everything has some variant of draenei or whatever their D&D predecessor was. I have never seen a character who resembled Sten. I have seen a million things that look like the concept art for the new Qunari. It looks like they just pulled the wings off a Disney Gargoyle.

Elves? Ok…
I’m not saying the new design is unique by any stretch of the imagination, but these way they do actually look like a foreign species/race. Before Sten and the Qunari looked way to human to me.

Eh, I see we’re not going to agree on this, so I’m just going to drop it and continue enjoying your work.

Ah man! I played like a good little rper the first go around and was too nice and I ended up dying… plus I was getting ticked off at everyone looking down on me for being a castless dwarf… So I went back and basically slaughtered, slept with, and pummeled people with heavy innuendo and spent a lot of time makin “friends” with my party members just so I could hear they’re funny convos while we walked! XD

Been reading for a while and never had the ambition to say anything. But I figured now would be as good a time as any.

Either way, there’s a couple quick things I want to say:
1) First and foremost, this comic is AWESOME. With a capital AWESOME… I never dreamed that any of these classic characters could be so downright silly. I commend you for doing a better job than most at making not only great jokes but great artwork as well. Most comics aren’t this high quality, even the ones with lots of funding. So, keep up the good work.

2) You’ve got another recommendation to play Mass Effect. The original is cheap at this point, so you don’t have a lot to lose. Actually, I like the original better than the sequel anyway.

3) From earlier, a dental cavity is a tooth that’s getting hollow, which is why they fill it in. Hollow = Cavity.

4) Brando wouldn’t be a religious figure if there wasn’t at least some debate on whether or not he was so great. I mean Jesus was crucified because he was so controversial at the time (never thought I’d talk about Marlon Brando and Jesus in the same paragraph, and pardon if I offend anyone by doing so)

5) I only created one bad character for D&D, and that was AFTER I’d played so many better ones. He was a cleric Asswipe (pronounced as-weep-eh) and he had charm, command, and every other manner of control spell to make sure that they erm… took it. Goooood times….

I lol so hard that now everything hurts XD… and im 100% agree with you my warden too end as a douchebag who had sexually harassed his entire team, and even more since i get the “free love” (no jealousy.. woohoo!! :D) mod XDXD

Where I grew up, whenever our roads started falling into disrepair they just tore up all the pavement and replaced it with gravel. It was a northern swamp town with permafrost, so paving that in the first place wasn’t the best idea, you just end up with a ripple chip after a year or two. Some of it they tore up because it was making everybody motion sick to drive over.

So i most definitely show your comics/website to all of my friends, and i check every day to see if by some miracle you updated another one. this week more than ever I’ve clicked my little bookmark for this website to show someone who’s peeking over my shoulder the webcomic that i hold in highest regards. They are then treated to the visuals of multiple ripped and scantily clad, banana hammock wearing strongmen. So now my friends question my sexual orientation. They dont even let me show them Jared and Mr. Fish being kings of everything :[